Wednesday, July 2, 2014

The "Central Management Servers" functionality of SQL Server Management Studio is an excellent way to apply the same code to every server. By "every server", I mean groups of servers that you define: you might have different servers in folders named "Production", "Development", "QA", "SQL Server 2000", etc. It just depends on your needs.

To get to the "Central Management Servers" pane in SSMS, simply select the "View, Registered Servers" menu item. After you've set up your servers, you can execute queries against every database in every server. The example below changes the width of a column in a table. Note that in this example, we look for only databases whose name begins with "DB100", we exclude read-only databases, and we specify the schema, table, and column name we want to modify. The code also checks that the length isn't already set to the value we want, to avoid unnecessary noise in the output. This code is compatible with SQL Server 2000 and later (hence the use of "syscolumns", etc.)

Before making the move to SQL Server, Larry specialized in Windows programming in C/Win32, C++/MFC, and C#/.NET. His blog focuses on query tuning, database optimization, and system performance, and features handy scripts, practical tips, and occasional dispatches from the many dark corners of SQL Server.